Fallen Angel
by AmazinglyMediocre
Summary: "A fallen angel, in the dark. Never thought you'd fall so far, Fallen angel, close your eyes. I won't let you fall tonight." Hybrid!Steve, Romanogers, inspired by "Fallen Angel" by Three Days Grace. I suck at summaries.


**Hello! This came to me a while back and I just got around to writing it. :) enjoy!**

I squinted in the sudden bright light as the door slid open. The gap expanded and then there was nothing between me and the sky. Wind whistled past my ears and the crew was chattering constantly through the comms. One step, two steps, and then I was flying. Well, not exactly. There's a huge difference between flying and falling, and right then I was falling. The water below was rushing up to meet me, the waves reaching to grab me and pull me under. I tucked in and let them, darting down to nearly twenty feet. The salty air was good in my lungs as I surfaced and took a deep breath.

"Do you know what a parachute is?" Clint sounded in my ear. I looked up to where he was drifting down, his own chute behind him.

"I prefer not to get tangled up when I'm trying to fight," I started to swim toward the ship we were attacking, which was basically a smaller version of the helicarrier. Bullets plonked into the water around me as I moved.

"I prefer not to break my legs," the archer grumbled.

"Sounds like a personal problem to me," I replied. Cold bled through my gloves as I grabbed onto a ladder rung.

"God, I hate the Pacific." Barton complained. "Damn jellyfish got me."

"Deal with it, Clint." Natasha broke in. She had latched onto another ladder that led up to the top deck. What should have been an easy climb was made much harder as I had to hold my shield above my head to deflect the steady rain of bullets. These guys just wouldn't stop. I nearly slipped when a shot glanced off of the rung my foot had just been on, breaking it off.

"Can you do anything?" I called to Barton, who was at the bottom of the ladder.

"Yeah, one second," he drew his bow and immediately took out one of the shooters. It wasn't long before they were all dead or hiding. I took my chance and quickly made the rest of the climb. A quick peek over the edge of the deck showed several jets and a fairly large number of hostiles.

"How bad is it?" Nat was just below the edge as well.

"Pretty bad," I ducked back down and prepared myself to jump.

"Don't do anything stupid, Steve." Barton was just below me now.

"Trying to take an aircraft carrier down with only three people is stupid in itself." I hurled myself up and onto the pavement, managing to hurl the shield and take out three men before I had to dive behind a helicopter. More screams and an explosion told me that Clint and Romanoff had followed me up. A quick roll put me back in the open and provided enough of a distraction that Hawkeye could fire off another arrow. Another shot, another explosion, another jet destroyed.

"Clear!" I shouted as soon as the deck was nothing but bodies and the smoldering remains of machinery. And then everything jolted and we were all knocked to our knees.

"What the hell was that?" Barton exclaimed when we had our bearings back.

"Turns out that we actually are on a helicarrier," Nat was staring out over the water. Or, well, where it had been. Now it was just open sky.

"How fast are we ascending?"

"Fast." She turned away from the blue and began to jog toward the bridge. "We need to get inside; the air's going to get a bit too thin for comfort."

"You two go," I waved them off. "I can stay out here." The super soldier serum-among other things-was what allowed me to breathe freely. Men started to appear from various hatches on the deck, each wearing a full face mask. Of course they had those. I faked to the left and darted right, catching several off guard and landing a punch on one man, cracking his mask and sending him flying into another. Gunshots rang out, only to be drowned in the ever growing roar of the wind. This was flying. I took a running leap, crossing a good ten feet, and landed on one of the hatches. I slammed the door down on four men and ducked out of the way of a rocket. These guys really didn't like me.

"Everything alright up there?" Barton came on the radio.

"Yeah, yeah, it's all good," I blocked a bullet and elbowed another guy in the chest. He stumbled and fell out into open air.

"We're going to try and put this thing down, though we can't make any guarantees that it'll be gentle." Romanoff sounded winded.

"Sounds good," two men took a shield to the chest and didn't move anymore. Another rocket whizzed past and exploded behind me.

"What is going on? Do they have rockets?" Clint sounded confused.

"Yeah, why?" I picked up a launcher from a man who was out cold and fired at a cluster of hostiles.

"Intel said there wasn't much in the way of weapons on this ship. That worries me."

"Well, they're not very good with them," I threw the launcher at one of the doors, slamming it shut.

"If they have much more than that, we need to clear out. The three of us can't realistically handle much more."

"Roger that," a grenade clattered to a stop at my feet. I quickly punted it and ducked behind my shield as chunks of shrapnel shot past. The number of enemies was plummeting. And then a rocket was aimed right for me and even ducking behind the shield didn't protect me from the searing heat. I could feel my boots skidding on the asphalt as I straightened again and pinpointed the source of the shot. Smoke was swirling around, clouding the entire platform. I waved it out of my face and dropped to the deck as several gunshots went off. One grazed my shoulder, digging deep into the skin there. It was a superficial wound, but it was already gushing blood. I grit my teeth and stood again, racing to cover. This was too exposed. And suddenly I was regretting Hawkeye's choice to blow everything up as I found that all hopes of hiding were up in smoke. Literally. I had to settle for my original helicopter, which was now a burned husk. The sky was only a few feet away now, the black pavement giving way to clear blue.

"Alright, we're starting the descent. Everything still okay?" Natasha asked.

"It's all fine and dandy out here," I tried to press a hand to the graze. It came back sticky and red. The stuff was everywhere, running down my arm and all over one side of my face. Another missile flew past and out into the open, dragging me out of the brief respite. I still had a job to do; my appearance could wait.

"Next time we do this, please don't blow everything up." I grumbled as I stepped out of cover and threw the shield again. It bounced off of a few heads and returned to my hand. From here I could see practically the whole battlefield. What I didn't see was the missile coming from the bridge. It went off directly in front of me and suddenly I was no longer flying. I was falling. But it wasn't a problem.

In all honesty, the serum probably doesn't allow breathing at super high altitudes or ten foot hops. It allows for better oxygenation, yes, and it allows for a ton more muscle bulk, but neither one of those can really give that kind of power. All the muscle adds too much weight for a jump like that, and even the best lungs have their limits. Only one animal can breathe at this kind of altitude and has the muscle to weight ratio to do these things: the bird.

You see, Tony Stark isn't the only Stark who has a love for flying. Howard had an even greater passion for the skies above, and one drunken decision led to another and he suddenly became involved in hybrid experimentation. Volunteer after volunteer failed or produced no results, and then the super soldier serum changed everything. It changed the person's genome and made it far more receptive to enhancement and modification. And now, here I am. The only successful human-avian hybrid of my time. Not only was I gifted with lighter, hollow bones, the eyesight of a raptor, and the extra air sacs and breathing capabilites of birds, but I was also given flight.

This gift, however, has been kept secret. Howard's experiments were illegal and cast a shadow over his legacy that didn't need to be seen. The modifications aren't even on my file, and only the very top people in SHIELD know about them. (Read: Nick Fury.) It's simply better that way.

I snapped open my wings, ripping holes in the back of my suit, and immediately began to rise back to the carrier. I was just about to grab onto one of the ladders when a man appeared at the top of it. He yelled something and took aim with his rifle. I tucked in and dropped back out into free air, trying to make time to take him out. And then even more faces appeared, several of which had very large weapons. This wasn't going to end well. The one downside to a twenty foot wingspan is the twenty foot wingspan. I was a gigantic target.

"What's going on? Where are you?" Clint was asking. My breath caught as an arrow appeared in a man's skull. They were going to see if I didn't do something.

The thing is, you don't always get to make the choices on how life goes. This was one of those times. An explosion of feathers on my right, and then the gift of flight was gone. Red hot pain spread through my wing and I pulled both of them back in. Which put me into freefall. I spun through the air, my arms windmilling and my legs uselessly kicking. I could barely hear Natasha screaming my name through the comms; the wind was too loud. The horizon spun and spun, never in the same place. My breathing was just a series of gasps as the water came closer and closer. I couldn't right myself, I couldn't I couldn't I couldn't. And then I was hitting the water-feet first, thankfully. The salt water invaded everything, reigniting the wound on my shoulder and making the pain in my wing nearly unbearable. I snapped my shield onto my back as I surfaced in order to hide the tears in my suit. Circumstances were going to be questionable as it was, and two wing slots weren't going to help.

"We need evac," Barton was saying. I watched as the carrier continued its descent and as bloody feathers drifted down around me. That had been a big mistake. A quinjet soon appeared in the distance and stopped to hover just over the water, its entry ramp just dipping below the surface. I hauled myself on and shook the water out of my hair. Doctor Banner was there in a moment, helping to pull me to my feet and into one of the seats against the wall. The door closed and then we were rising to land on the helicarrier. Nat and Clint were the only two conscious people on the deck, and they looked pretty beat up.

"What happened?" Both of them demanded as they stepped inside.

"Something blew up," I winced as Bruce started poking around my shoulder.

"Where's all that coming from?" Romanoff pointed at the puddle of blood that was forming on the floor below me.

"Shoulder. Got a bad graze," I swallowed and leaned my head back on the wall.

"You sure? That's a lot of blood."

"I'm sure." I closed my eyes. The adrenaline rush was wearing off, leaving me wasted and empty.

I woke up to the jolt of the quinjet landing. A quick look around revealed that we were back in New York. Everything was sore as I stood and stretched, blinking the sleep out of my eyes. The others were already up and gathering their gear.

"Come with me," Bruce motioned for me to follow as we stepped out of the jet and into Stark Tower. We walked down to his lab and he quietly went about shutting all the doors and told Jarvis to lock them.

"What's this all about?" I sat down where he told me to.

"Why were there feathers in the water and stuck to you?" He leaned against his desk across from me. "There wasn't a bird around for miles."

"Apparently there was one," I knew it was a lame excuse.

"Why are you still bleeding, even though I took care of your shoulder?" He knew.

I sighed and unclipped the shield from my back. "Howard took things a bit too far." I told him. The doctor nodded.

"As did I," he murmured. I quietly unfurled my uninjured wing and shook it out. "What else?" Banner's eyes flicked over the wing and then back to my face. "Is it just wings?"

"No, enhanced lungs, eyesight, and hollow bones."

"I see that your wings are built like an albatross's, correct?"

"I'm not sure," I picked up a black feather from the table.

"The markings are the same, too." They were black on the outside and white on the inside, which was a perfect natural camoflauge. "Made to weather storms and fly at high speeds for long periods of time." He walked over and moved behind me, running his fingers over my open wing. "That's odd, you have owl-like lead feathers. They allow for silent flight."

"Howard wanted the ultimate wing, I guess."

"Can you move the other?" His fingers found my closed wing and gently eased it out. "I'm guessing that you have stronger shoulder and back muscles," he was trying to distract me from the pain.

"Yeah," I exhaled. The scent of blood was slowly filling the room.

"They hit you with something fairly high caliber, which means that this could be messy." He started picking feathers out of the wound, which was practically a hole in my wing. It wasn't pretty. Pain was racing through the entire area, and all I wanted to do was tuck it back in. "It doesn't look like the bone has been damaged, which is good." He returned to his desk and started fiddling with a syringe. "Local anesthetic," he quietly went about his work and then pressed the needle into a clean patch near the wound. It wasn't long before I couldn't feel at all from that wing.

"Please don't tell anyone about this," I whispered once he was done.

"I wasn't going to." He smiled and patted my uninjured shoulder. "You would have said something already if you wanted this to be known."

Doctor Banner is a good, good man.

I found my way up to my apartment without interruption, only to see Natasha waiting for me. She was sitting on the counter, her fingers wrapped around a mug of coffee. It was part of our post-mission ritual, I guess. She would appear and make some coffee, and we would often sit in silence and enjoy each other's company.

"Why did Bruce want you?"

"Just to make sure my shoulder was fine." I made my way into my bedroom and quietly changed out of the uniform, making sure to rip the holes into a larger one that wouldn't attract as much scrutiny. My back felt incredibly stiff as I walked back out and started scrubbing my shield clean in the sink.

"You alright?" I glanced over at the bandage that covered one side of her forehead.

"Yeah, I'm fine." She smiled. God, I love her smiles. "Are you?"

"Of course," it was always so easy to be around her.

"Is that a feather?" Nat reached over and picked one out of my hair. "Where did this come from?"

"A bird got shot down while I was fighting or something," I shrugged with one shoulder. "They were all in the water when I landed."

"Funny," she looked it over. It was a white one. "Or maybe an angel fell."

"He probably fell for you." I shut the water off and left the shield where it was.

"I doubt that," she set her coffee down. "I'm pretty sure that my guardian angel died a long time ago."

"Who knows," I tucked her into my chest. "I'd fall for you."

 **Please leave a review and tell me how it is! Constructive criticism is always welcome.**


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